Movie Reviews

Yet again here's some catching up on movie reviews. This should be a good way to avoid reading about the debt ceiling.

Horrible Bosses - I was surprised that I found this really funny. Jasons Bateman and Sudeikis and Charlie Day are three friends with horrible bosses, each in a different way. In a nod to Strangers on a Train (and Throw Momma from the Train) and with some advice from a consultant, they decide to murder each others bosses. The setup is just ok, but once they start recon I was laughing consistently. Kevin Spacey is great as the obnoxious boss he's played before and Jennifer Aniston is good as the sex crazed dentist. Colin Farrell is a bit over the top as the coke addict son of Donald Sutherland with a family chemical business, but it's probably mostly his haircut. Refreshingly it's not just grossout humor, but genuinely funny (and involved) situations and dialog. And it doesn't hurt seeing alumni from The Wire.

Tree of Life - Terrence Malick's latest is not for everyone. Think of it as poetry or music rather than a novel. There's no plot and barely any narrative at all. I think (and I'm really not sure on this basic point but it doesn't really matter) that Sean Penn is an adult who's brother has died which triggers fragments of memories of his childhood growing up in a suburban town. It's mostly short voice overs that trigger a flood of images. There's an opening segment where the mother wonders "what do we mean to god" and that triggers a 20 minute scene of space imagery meant to suggest the origin of the universe and creation earth with the evolution of life including a couple of scenes of dinosaurs. One approaches another and pins it down and then walks away. I've seen lots of articles wondering about this but to me it obviously mirrors a scene later in the film where one brother pins the other one. We're not so different from animals, even previous generations of them. I really like it for the first two hours or so, though several people in my theater got up and left saying they didn't come for a National Geographic special. I thought the narrative would come together at the end a bit, it seemed like it was spiraling to that, but it didn't and I got impatient with it. This film is (obviously) not for the casual movie goer, but like Kubrick and Fellini, no one makes films like Malick. I have a hard enough time editing down vacation photos or making an iTunes playlist in anything but chronological order, I don't know how he strings together images and scenes into what he does.

Midnight in Paris - Woody Allen's latest is about a writer on vacation with his fiance and her parents in Paris. He's a bit neurotic and is struggling with finishing a novel instead of being a screenwriter. Sound at all familiar? He falls in love with Paris or rather a nostalgic view of Paris. The movie takes a fantastical turn which I think worked really well. The problem is the main character is just Owen Wilson doing Woody Allen and the others are mostly thin standins for characters. I usually like Rachel McAdams but she has nothing to do here. It's a great idea and has some very fun moments, overall I liked it, but I think he should have spent more time on it and refined it into something great. Maybe someone will remake it.

Super 8 - I knew very little about Super 8 going into it but had hope since it got very strong reviews. However nothing stuck with me. It just seemed like a series of scenes and after 10 mins I forgot them. Really, halfway through the film I wasn't remembering parts of it. Part of it was how I saw it. The back seat of a small BMW in a drivein in the rain is not ideal. Part of it was I think the storytelling. It felt like parts of Lost where there's a mystery that's slowly revealed but is in the end inconsequential. And it was that way in big mysteries and little ones. For example, there's a scene where kid is outside screaming for Lucy, we don't know who Lucy is. It turns out it was his dog and the animals have gone missing from the town. Did we have to turn the name of his dog into a mini-mystery? The big reveal was pretty obvious and was just an excuse for a story. The action scenes didn't do much for me either. There's a big train crash that happens where the kids are filming at night. It goes on and on there's no way any of them would have survived but they do. Things explode right next to them but the worst that happens is they're knocked down. It just didn't feel right. But I think I have to give it another shot to be fair.

The Perfect Host - I caught a preview of this on HDNetMovies. Clayne Crawford just robbed a bank and is on the run. After his getaway runs into a snag, he goes to a mailbox, finds a postcard and knocks on David Hyde Pierce's door and pretends to be a friend of a friend to hide out there. Pierce is a character and is preparing a dinner party and things get strange between these two. There are a few big turns and it was pretty fun, but there are a few too many turns at the end and it doesn't hold together. Pierce is great in this role and is the reason to see it, but catch it on cable or as a cheap rental.

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps - I think the reviews (as I remember them) got this right; there's a pretty good movie in here but it's lost in bunch of extra stuff. Gekko is out of jail and while broke, he's hawking a book Is Greed Good? and lecturing. Shia LaBeouf is a young trader who's dating Gekko's estranged daughter Carey Mulligan. LaBeouf's firm is a standin for Lehman and Josh Brolin's is representing Goldman. At times, characters deliver exposition explaining the actual financial crisis, it's barely a parallel. I thought most of the plot was pretty obvious, but it spent too much time on extraneous things. Do we have to see Susan Sarandon as LaBeouf's mom who's flipping houses? LaBeouf must be good because he wants to invest in green nuclear fusion but am I didn't buy a chief scientist calling him all the time asking for $100 million investment. I still don't know why Mulligan was dating a trader at all. And I didn't for a second buy that a investment bank CEO would be out motorcycle racing with a young trader on a day the market was crashing because it was too depressing. Or another CEO wandering Central Park midday. Things felt too constructed and not tight enough and too obvious in places. The Charlie Sheen cameo was telling. I remember liking Bud in the first film, now of course Sheen is a joke. LaBeouf didn't do anything to make me care about him, Mulligan deserved better (well not really but her character in An Education did).

Tamara Drewe - This was a fun British countryside farse based on a good graphic novel (serialized as a comic strip) by Posy Simmonds which is a modernization of on the novel Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (whew). It's set at a writer's retreat in a small country town and there are a lot of characters. The adulterous crime novelist and his faithful wife/editor, the beautiful young girl back from the big city, the stableboy (well not quite but that's a good enough word), the two bored teenagers, the rock star, and various writers. The nice thing is that they are all fully realized characters and not just caricatures. Stephen Frears made a fun diversion, I don't know why it never really got a US distribution.

Love Crimes of Kabul - I saw this on HBO last night and I don't know why it's not in IMDb. It's a documentary following three women in prison in Afghanistan for "moral crimes". Basically they all are accused of having sex while not married. Both they and the men are in prison and the system is setup so that if they marry their possible 20 year sentences are greatly reduced. One got pregnant out of wedlock, her boyfriend refused to marry her, so she reported him in hopes that fear of staying in prison will convince him to marry her. An 18 year-old was found in a closet with her 17 year-old boyfriend and turned in by her father. She wants to marry the boy, him not so much. Doctors verify her virginity but her fate in uncertain. Another girl ran away from an abusive home and was taken in by a woman who then tried to sell her. Now both are sharing a cell and the woman wants the girl to marry her son because the family can't afford a virgin bride for him. This is not just pre-60s US mores with strict legal ramifications, this is a completely different way of thinking. Marriages are arranged and come with dowries. The rules seem outdated but are so ingrained (and I guess ordained by God) that even though these people broke them, there's no questioning them, not even the thought of it. One guard explains that pre-marital sex is a crime but sodomy is so much worse it isn't even listed as a crime. The film was fascinating as it exposes a society with rules and logic that I can in no way fathom. I understand why we're there or what we hope to accomplish even less.

Hot Coffee - I missed this at IFFBoston but caught it on HBO. Everyone knows about the woman who spilled McDonald's coffee on her lap and sued because it was too hot but most view it as an example of what's wrong with the legal system. The real facts aren't well known and this films covers them. Once you see the photos of the burns she suffered you're convinced. But the film just uses this case as a jumping off point to explain real distortions in the legal system. Large companies (like tobacco, drug and insurance companies) have funded campaigns to convince us that they are at the mercy of a legal system run amok with frivolous lawsuits and out-of-control monetary awards. It's not really true and the legal reforms are hurting real people. They cover a family who's son has cerebral palsy because of malpractice. They won a judgement based on what a lifetime of care would cost but because of caps, that was cut by 75%. Now what are they supposed to do? It also covers the Jamie Leigh Jones case. She was a Halliburton employee who was raped and because of an employment contract her case went to a biased arbitration instead of a trial. It's all good stuff and well worth seeing.

The Pawnbroker - This is a great 1965 film by Sidney Lumet starring Rod Steiger. Sol owns a pawnshop in Harlem and is completely dissociated from his life. He lives alone in a high rise, has few friends, ignores questions and is annoyed by people trying to be nice to him. The reason is he survived a Nazi concentration camp and is still in shock. Everyday events cause him to remember scenes of his children dying or his wife being raped or other atrocities. We see these in short flashbacks. This was the US first film to address the Holocaust and also was the first film to pass the Hayes Code with brief nudity. It's from the sixties so by today's standards the images aren't too bad but it's still remarkably effective at evoking sympathy for the main character and at making comparison between ghetto life and war. Steiger is great and got the films only Oscar nomination. That he lost to Lee Marvin in Cat Ballou is ridiculous. The score is by Quincy Jones and introduced the song Soul Bossa Nova, now known as the theme to Austin Powers.

The Rack - This is Paul Newman's second film and is only recently available on DVD. He plays a Korean war prison returning home and court-martialed for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. He was tortured and signed some documents. Walter Pidgeon is his Colonel father and Lee Marvin was another prisoner who testifies against him. In parts it's dated, particularly how his father acts. But for its time it was exploring topics that weren't covered a lot. It's also not simplistic and takes a few turns I wasn't expecting. It's based on a teleplay by Rod Serling, which explains everything. Worth your time to watch.

Mr. Hulot's Holiday - This was my first Jacques Tati film who I heard of because of last year's The Illusionist. Tati made six features and this was the first to feature Hulot. It takes place at a seaside resort in a small hotel with various guests. He's kind of a Chaplinesque character, silent, a bit awkward and causing trouble. While Chaplin and Keaton were the center of the action, Hulot seems to cause a problem and then we watch it travel through the other characters in the scene who usually barely notice him. I suspect at the time it mocked specific societal norms but much of that was lost on me now. Instead it's a rather entertaining film with charming characters and a very slow pace. There's sound but it's mostly sound effects, background noises, music and some mumbling. I'll admit to hitting fast forward a few times. Still, it put a smile on my face and made me interested in trying a few other of his films.